It is a hard pill to take.

There is no god on Wayland.

NixOS learning curve maybe is not so hard. You can start with default configurations and installed Calamares what is as simple as on other distros. Than look for options and try.

Otherwise, Flatpaks are reproducible (build with flatpak-builder as on Flathub).

I’m sick of all the attempts to whitewash the recent Red Hat move. This makes things only worse. Fedora will not be affected, Alma has a bright future, CentOS is open to all, “rebuilders”, clones…

Major: Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Arch and also FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux but still).

Other and esoteric: Void, Alpine, Solus, CRUX, Slackware, Mageia/OpenMandriva,

Corporate sponsored: Fedora, openSUSE

Sun is now Oracle anyway.

BTW there was a nice idea behind the only close button in early GNOME 3. Apps were intended to save the state on exit, so one doesn’t need to minimize windows, they can close it and reopen at any time and see the exact content of a window. But GNOME completely has failed to deliver that idea.

What makes things worse, there was no clear way to keep apps on the background when the main window is closed. It was seemed as antifeature. But that was a different world where weren’t so much of internet service applications running on the background 24h a day. Now there is a background portal but with quite minimal support in the DE.

Maybe it’s just a general habit of mine that I keep minimum things open at time and close everything after use: desktop windows, android apps, browser tabs. So I use up to 3-5 dynamic workspaces most of the time.

I switch between apps from overview or by typing in search, or by sliding between workspaces. It is more convenient to me than classic desktops with a taskbar and minimized windows.

Always has been.

But to be fair, openSUSE was my first linux distro after Windows and YaST had been helpful to me before I learned how to use console commands. And then I switched to another distro.

I you are asking about permissions so yes. I often limit access filesystem paths, dbus proxy, devices and network.

Flatpak was started by RH employee but has been developed with significant community effort.

Flatpak uses ostree, which was originally created in GNOME for GNOME OS. And GNOME has contributors not only from RH but form Endless, Collabora, Purism and others.

Flatpak can work with OCI remotes, this is what RH more interested in. And Flathub uses only ostree. OCI remotes are used in Fedora Flatpaks repacked from fedora packages with the runtime based on fedora. But who use it anyway.

Flathub itself is independent community effort. It uses org.freedesktop.Platform based runtimes which are not based on any distro.

XDG Portals are shaped by Flathub maintainers and applications developers where RH also doesn’t play significant role.

I use flatpaks mostly. Flatpak dependencies (runtimes) are stored separately from the host system so and don’t bloat my system with unwanted libraries and binaries. App data and configs are stored separately and better organized. Everything runs in sanboxes. I use overrides extensively. All these are very convenient for me.

Where can I track package versions without installing? https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ and https://packages.debian.org/unstable/ show outdated packages.

The problem with Debian testing is that packages are not fresh, neither packages are fresh in sid. So, Debian is not a replacement for rolling distros like Arch Linux or openSUSE Thumbleweed

And ChromeOS is even more popular.

What you see when you upload files is not a FM but an open file dialog. Yeah, it sucks. Maybe it’s worth to play with xdg-desktop-portal and alternative fronteds: e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-kde. But I don’t know if it’s better.

To go x86_64-only was a mistake for Arch. Distros like Fedora or Debian, or openSUSE have universal building systems and infrastructure for building packages for different architectures. Arch just creates unnecessary fragmentation for the GNU/Linux landscape: software need to be packaged for the distro and for the same time PKGBUILDs cannot be reused in general for anything to go full Arch Linux. Not for other architectures, not for servers or LTS. Only for a x86_64 desktop niche. Arch Linux doesn’t scale.

BTW I use GNOME without any extensions.

First of all, I think an idea of package management separated from a system environment is generally good for desktop usage. And don’t like and the idea to place all existing application software in distro repositories. But implementations are far from ideal. So I list those bellow from worse to better.

1. AppImage. It highly relies on the environment doesn’t have native sandboxing, and promotes bad practices like building apps with old libraries.

2. Snap. Snap is mostly fine but relies only on AppArmor for confinement, has performance issues for a long time without significant progress. It promotes a proprietary app store. Relies on Ubuntu infrastructure. Good: snap store support signed packages and more friendly to developers.

3. Flatpak. App start time is near to native. It has stronger sanboxing but with many holes for compatibility. It true distro-independent as well as popular runtimes are also distro-independent. Bad: Flathub doesn’t support signed applications. Sandboxing and permissions rely on hacks and tricks which are far from good design. Development is slow but it is true for the mentioned above as well.

With that, I am more open to new alternatives, especially if started from a system point of view rather than from a position of distro-independent package managers like Google did with Android. For example, sandboxing can rely on users separation and work on various operating systems not only with Linux kernel.